Thank you Al,

Your touched a point that had bitten us already when we changed email hosting to MS. Will keep eyes open for that.

Alex



>>>>What service do people here find most reliable when reserving a domain name? Godaddy? Another one? It will be used to access an application hosted in Azure.
>>>
>>>I haven't used them a lot but GoDaddy has been fine. Decent support the odd time I've had to make use of it. Prices may not be rock bottom but not bad. A decent combination of price and support.
>>
>>Thank you Michel and all.
>
>One thing somewhat related to domain registration is DNS. When you register a domain with, say, GoDaddy, then GoDaddy also by default becomes the authoritative name server for your new domain. In other words, GoDaddy's name servers are the ultimate authority saying which IP addresses correspond to yourdomain.com.
>
>What often happens later, though, is a company will want a web site developed. The site developer builds the site and hosts it on another provider (they might even get a $ per month kickback). This may require that your name servers be switched to the web site host provider.
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>If that happens it can still be OK but I highly recommend ensuring whichever organization has your domain's authoritative name servers has a user-modifiable DNS control panel. Some don't, and require that you send requests to their tech support via e-mail. This can still be OK but I've had a couple of extremely bad experiences with this type of support. Specifically, I made explicit, exact technical support requests and it took 12 - 24 hours to respond and when they did respond they screwed up worse than I would have believed possible, taking down existing e-mail and other services hosted by other providers. I'm looking at you, uniserve.com.
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>You probably won't need to work with DNS often after you get things set up, but having an incompetent or unresponsive DNS provider can be a nightmare.